Kenny Anthony. Ancient Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy Volume 1
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of change as the passage from potentiality to actuality, whether (as in
substantial change) from matter to form or (as in accidental change) from
one to another quality of a substance. These technical notions, which he
employed in such an astonishing variety of contexts, will be examined in
detail in later chapters.
Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos owes much to his Presocratic precursors
and to Plato’s Timaeus. The earth was in the centre of the universe: around it
a succession of concentric crystalline spheres carried the moon, the sun,
and the planets in their journeys around the visible sky. The heavenly
bodies were not compounds of the four terrestrial elements, but were
made of a superior Wfth element or quintessence. They had so uls as well as
bodies: living supernatural intellects, guiding their travels through the
cosmos. These intellects were movers which were themselves in motion,
and behind them, Aristotle argued, there must be a source of movement
not itself in motion. The only way in which an unchanging, eternal mover
could cause motion in other beings was by attracting them as an object of
love, an attraction which they express by their perfect circular motion. It is
thus that Dante, in the Wnal lines of his Paradiso, Wnds his own will, like a
smoothly rotating wheel, caught up in the love that moves the sun and all
the other stars.
Even the best of Aristotle’s scientiWc work has now only a historical
interest. The abiding value of treatises such as his Physics is in the philo-
sophical analyses of some of the basic concepts that pervade the physics of
diVerent eras, such as space, time, causation, and determinism. These are
examined in detail in Chapter 5. For Aristotle biology and psychology were
parts of natural philosophy no less than physics and chemistry, since they
too studied diVerent forms of physis, or nature. The biological works we have
already looked at; the psychological works will be examined more closely
in Chapter 7.
The Aristotelian corpus, in addition to the systematic scientiWc treatises,
contains a m assive collection of occasional jottings on scientiWc topics, the
Problems. From its structure this appears to be a commonplace book in
which Aristotle wrote down provisional answers to questions that were put
to him by his students or corresponde nts. Because the questions
are grouped rather haphazardly, and often appear several times—and are
sometimes given diVerent answers—it seems unlikely that they were
generated by Aristotle himself, whether as a single series or over a lifetime .
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
But the collection contains many fascinating details that throw insight into
the workings of his omnivorous intellect.
Some of the questions are the kind of thing a patient might bring to a
doctor. Ought drugs to be used, rather than surgery, for sores in the
armpits and groin? (1. 34. 863a21). Is it true that purslane mixed with salt
stops inXammation of the gums? (1. 38. 863b12). Does cabbage really cure a
hangover? (3. 17. 873b1). Why is it diYcult to have sex under water? (4. 14.
878a35). Other question s and answers make us see Aristotle more in the role
of agony aunt. How should one cope with the after-eVects of eating garlic?
(13. 2. 907 b 28–908a10). How does one prevent biscuit from becoming hard?
(21. 12. 928a12). Why do drunken men kiss old women they would never
kiss when sober? (30. 15. 953b15). Is it right to punish more seriously thefts
from a public place than thefts from a private house? (29. 14. 952 a16). More
seriously, why is it more terrible to kill a woman than a man, although the
male is naturally superior to the female? (29. 11. 951a12).
A whole book of the Problems (26) is devoted essentially to weather
forecasting. Other books contain questions that simply reXect general
curiosity. Why does the noise of a saw being sharpened set our teeth on
edge? (7. 5. 886b10). Why do humans not have manes? (10. 25. 893b17). Why
do non-human animals not sneeze or squint? (Don’t they?) (10. 50. 896b5; 54.
897a1). Why do barbarians and Greeks alike count up to ten? (15. 3. 910b23).
Why is a Xute better than a lyre as an a ccompaniment to a solo voice? (19. 43.
922a1). Very often, the Problems ask ‘Why is such and such the case?’ when a
more appropriate question would have been ‘Is such and such the case?’ For
instance, Why do Wshermen have red hair? (37. 2. 966 b 25). Why does a large
choir keep time better than a small one? (19. 22. 919a36).
The Problems let us see Aristotle with his hair down, rather like the table
talk of later writers. One of his questions is particularly endearing to those
who may have found it hard to read their way through his more diYcult
works: Why is it that some people, if they begin to read a serious book, are
overcome by sleep even against their will? (18. 1. 916b1).
The Legacy of Aristotle and Plato
When Alexander the Great died in 323, democratic Athens became uncom-
fortable even for an anti-imperialist Macedonian. Saying that he did not
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
wish the city that had executed Socrates ‘to sin twice against philosophy’,
Aristotle escaped to Chalcis, where he died in the following year. His will,
which survives, makes thoughtful provision for a large number of friends
and dependants. His library was left to Theophrastus, his successor as head
of the Lyceum. His own papers were vast in size and scope—those that
survive today total around a million words, and it is said that we possess
only one-Wfth of his output. As we have seen, in addition to philosophical
treatises on logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and politics, they included
historical works on constitutions, theatre and sport, and scientiWc works
on botany, zoology, biology, psychology, chemistry, meteorology, astron-
omy, and cosmology.
Since the Renaissance it has been traditional to regard the Academy and
the Lyceum as two opposite poles of philosophy. Plato, according to this
tradition, was idealistic, utopian, other-worldly; Aristotle was realistic,
utilitarian, commonsensical. Thus, in Raphael’s School of Athens Plato, wear-
ing the colours of the volatile elements air and Wre, points heavenwards;
Aristotle, clothed in watery blue and earthy green, has his feet Wrmly on
the ground. ‘Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist,’ wrote
S. T. Coleridge. ‘They are the two classes of men, besides which it is
next to impossible to conceive a third.’ The philosopher Gilbert Ryle in
the twentieth century improved on Coleridge. Men could be divided
into two classes on the basis of four dichotomies: green versus blue,
sweet versus savoury, cats versus dogs, Plato versus Ari stotle. ‘Tell me
your preference on one of these pairs’, Ryle used to say, ‘and I will tell
you your preference on the other three.’8
In fact, as we have already seen and will see in greater detail later, the
doctrines that Plato and Aristotle share are more important than those
that divide them. Many post-Renaissance historians of ideas have been less
perceptive than the many commentators in late antiquity who saw it as
their duty to construct a harmonious concord between the two greatest
philosophers of the ancient world.
It is sometimes said that a philo sopher should be judged by the import-
ance of the questions he raises, not the correctness of the answers he gives.
If that is so, then Plato has an uncontestable claim to pre-eminence as a
philosopher. He was the Wrst to pose questions of great profundity, many of
8 Preference for an item on the left of a pair was supposed to go with preference for the other
leftward items, and similarly for rightward preferences.
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
which remain open questions in philosophy today. But Aristotle too can
claim a signiWcant contribution to the intellectual patrimony of the world.
For it was he who invented the concept of Science as we understand it
today and as it has been understood since the Renaissance.
First, he is the Wrst person whose surviving works show detailed obser-
vations of natural phenomena. Secondly, he was the Wrst philosopher to
have a sound grasp of the relationship between observation and theory in
scientiWc method. Thirdly, he identiW ed and classiWed diVerent scientiWc
disciplines and explored their relationships to each other: the very concept
of a distinct discipline is due to him. Fourthly, he is the Wrst professor to
have organized his lectures into courses, and to have taken trouble over
their appropriate place in a syllabus (cf. Pol. 1. 10. 1258a20). Fifthly, his
Lyceum was the Wrst research institute of which we have any detailed
knowledge in which a number of scholars and investigators joined in
collaborative inquiry and documentation. Sixthly, and not least important,
he was the Wrst person in history to build up a research library—not simply
a handful of books for his own bookshelf, but a systematic collection to be
used by his colleagues and to be handed on to posterity.9 For all these
reasons, every academic scientist in the world today is in Aristotle’s debt.
He well deserved the title he was given by Dante: ‘the master of those who
know’.
Aristotle’s School
Theophrastus (372–287), Aristotle’s ingenious successor as head of the
Lyceum, continued his master’s researches in several ways. He wrote
extensively on botan y, a discipline that Aristotle had touched only lightly.
He improved on Ari stotle’s modal logic, and anticipated some later Stoic
innovations. He disagreed with some fundamental principles of Aristotle’s
cosmology, such as the nature of place and the need for a motionless
mover. Like his master, he wrote copiously, and the mere list of the titles of
his works takes up sixteen pages in the Loeb edition of his life by Diogenes
Laertius. They include essays on vertigo, on honey, on hair, on jokes, and
on the eruption of Etna. The best known of his surviving works is a book
9 See L. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 28–9.
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
A Venetian representation of King Ptolemy and his library at Alexandria
entitled Characters, modelled on Aristotle’s delineation in his Ethics of
individual virtues and vices, but sketching them with greater reWnement
and with a livelier wit. He was a diligent historian of philosophy, and the
part of his doxography that survives, On the Senses, is one of our main sources
for Presocratic theories of sensation.
One of Theophrastus’ pupils, Demetrius of Phaleron, was an adviser to
one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy, who made himself king of Egypt in
305. It is possible that it was he who suggested the creation in the new city
of Alexandria of a library modelled on that of Aristotle, a project that was
carried out by Ptolemy’s son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The history of
Aristotle’s own library is obscure. On Theophrastus’ death it seems to
have been inherited not by the next head of the Lyceum, the physicist
Strato, but by Theophrastus’ nephew Neleus of Skepsis, one of the last
surviving pupils of Aristotle himself. Neleus’ heirs are said to have hidden
the books in a cave in order to prevent them from being conWscated by
agents of King Eumenes, who was building up a library at Pergamon to rival
that of Alexandria. Rescued by a bibliophile and taken to Athens, the story
goes, the books were conWscated by the Roman general Sulla when he
captured the city in 86 bc, and shipped to Rome, where they were Wnally
edited and published by Andronicus of Rhodes around the middle of the
Wrst century bc (Strabo 609–9; Plutarch, Sulla 26).10
Every detail of this story has been called in question by one or another
scholar,11 but if true it would account for the oblivion that overtook
Aristotle’s writings between the time of Theophrastus and that of Cicero.
It has been well said that ‘If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272
bc, on the Wftieth anniver sary of his death, he would hardly have recog-
nized it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched
for much of his life.’12
It was not that philosophy at that date was dormant in Athens: far from
it. Though the Lyceum under Strato was a shadow of itself, and the
10 Puzzlingly, our best ancient catalogue of the Andronican edition appears to have been
made by a librarian at Alexandria. Is it possible that Mark Antony acquired the corpus from an
heir of the proscribed Sulla and shipped them oV to Cleopatra to Wll the gaps in her recently
destroyed library, just as her earlier lover Julius Caesar had pillaged the Pergamum library for
her beneWt?
11 See J. Barnes, in J. Barnes and M. GriYn, Philosophia Togata, vol. ii (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997), 1–23.
12 Introd. to LS, 1.
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
Platonic Academy under its new head Arcesilaus had given up metaphysics
in favour of a narrow scepticism, there were two Xourishing new schools of
philosophy in the city. The best-known philosophers in Athens were
members neither of the Academy nor of the Lyceum, but were the
founders of these new schools: Epicurus, who established a school
known as The Garden, and Zeno of Citium, whose followers were called
Stoics because he taught in the Stoa, or painted portico.
Epicurus
Epicurus was born into a family of Athenian expatriates in Samos, and paid
a brief visit to Athens in the last year of Aristotle’s life. During early travels
he studied under a follower of Democritus, and established more than one
school in the Greek islands. In 306 he set up house in Athens and lived
there until his death in 271. His followers in the Garden included women
and slaves; they lived in seclusion and ate simple fare. He wrote 300 books,
we are told, but all that survive intact are three letters and two groups of
maxims. His philosophy of nature is set out in a letter to Herodotus and a
letter to Pythocles; in the third letter, to Menoecus, he summarizes his
moral teaching. The Wrst set of maxims, forty in number, has been
preserved, like the three letters, in the life of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius:
it is called Kyriai Doxai, or major doctrines. Eighty-one similar aphorisms
were discovered in a Vatican manuscript in 1888. Fragments from Epicurus’
lost treatise On Nature were buried in volcanic ash at Herculaneum when
Vesuvius erupted in ad 79. Painstaking eVorts to unroll and decipher them,
begun in 1800, continue to the present day. But for most of our knowledge
of his teachings, however, we depend on the surviving writings of his
followers, especially a much later writer, the Latin poet Lucretius.
The aim of Epicurus’ philosophy is to make happiness possible by
removing the fear of death, which is the greatest obstacle to tranquillity.
Men struggle for wealth and power so as to postpone death; they throw
themselves into frenzied activity so that they can forget its inevitability. It is
religion that causes us to fear death, by holding out the prospect of
suVering after death. But this is an illusion. The terrors held out by religion
are fairy tales, which we must give up in favour of a scientiWc account of
the world.
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
This scientiWc account is taken mainly from Democritus’ atomism.
Nothing comes into being from nothing: the basic units of the world are
everlasting, unchanging, indivisible units or a toms. These, inWnite in
number, move about in the void, which is empty and inWnite space: if
there were no void, movement would be impossible. This motion had no
beginning, and initially all atoms move downwards at constant and equal
speed. From time to time, however, they swerve and collide, and it is from
the collision of atoms that everything in heaven and earth has come into
being. The swerve of the atoms allows scope for human freedom, even
though their motions are blind and purposeless. Atoms have no properties
other than shape, weight, and size. The properties of perceptible bodies are
not illusions, but they are supervenient on the basic properties of atoms.
There is an inWnite number of worlds, some like and some unlike our own
(Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 38–45).
Like everything else, the soul consists of atoms, diVering from other
atoms only in being smaller and subtler; these are dispersed at death and
the soul ceases to perceive (Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 63–7). The gods
too are built out of atoms, but they live in a less turbulent region, immune
to dissolution. They live happy lives, untroubled by concern for human
beings. For that reason belief in providence is superstition, and religious
rituals a waste of time (Letter to Menoecus, D.L. 10. 123–5). Since we are
free agents, thanks to the atomic swerve, we are masters of our own fate:
the gods neither impose necessity nor interfere with our choices.
Epicurus believed that the senses were reliable sources of information,
which operate by transmitting images from external bodies into the atoms
of our soul. Sense-impressions are never, in themselves, false, though we
may make false judgements on the basis of genuine appearances. If appear-
ances conXict (if, for instance, something looks smooth but feels rough)
then the mind must give judgement between these competing witnesses.
Pleasure, for Epicurus, is the beginning and end of the happy life. This
does not mean, however, that Epicurus was an epicure. His life and that of
his followers was far from luxurious: a good piece of cheese, he said, was as
good as a feast. Though a theoretical hedonist, in practice he attached
importance to a distinction he made between diVerent types of pleasure.
There is one kind of pleasure that is given by the satisfaction of our desires
for food, drink, and sex, but it is an inferior kind of pleasure, because it is
bound up with pain. The desire these pleasures satisfy is itself painful, and
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
its satisfaction leads to a renewal of desire. The pleasures to be aimed at are
quiet pleasures such as those of private friendship (Letter to Menoecus,
D.L. 10 . 27–32).
To his last, Epicurus insisted that for a philosopher pleasure, in any
circumstances, could outweigh pain. On his deathbed he wrote the
following letter to his friend Idomeneus: ‘I write this to you on the blissful
day that is the last of my life. Strangury and dysentery have set in, with the
greatest possible intensity of pain. I counterbalance them by the joy I have
in the memory of our past conversations’ (D.L. 10. 22). He lived up to his
conviction that death, though inescapable, is, if we take a truly philosoph-
ical view of it, not an evil.
Stoicism
Stoics, like Epicureans, sought tranquillity, but by a diVerent route. The
founder of Stoicism was Zeno of Citium (334–262 bc). Zeno was born in
Cyprus, but migrated to Athens in 313. He read Xenophon’s memoir of
Socrates, which gave him a passion for philosophy. He was told that the
nearest contemporary equivalent of Socrates was Crates the Cynic. Cyni-
cism was not a set of philosophical doctrines, but a way of life expressing
contempt for wealth and disdain for conventional propriety. Its founder
was Diogenes of Sinope, who lived like a dog (‘cynic’ m eans ‘dog-like’) in a
tub for a kennel, wearing coarse clothes and subsisting on alms. A contem-
porary of Plato, for whom he had no gr eat respect, Diogenes was famou s
for his snub to Alexander the Great. When the great man visited him and
asked, ‘What can I do for you’, Diogenes replied, ‘You can move out of my
light’ (D.L. 6. 38). Crates, impressed by Diogenes, gave his wealth to the
poor and imitated his bohemian lifestyle; but he was less misanthropic, and
had a keen sense of humour that he expressed in poetic satire.
Zeno was Crates’ pupil for a time, but he did not become a cynic and
drop out of society, though he avoided formal dinners and was fond of
basking in the sun. After some years as a student of the Academy, he set up
his own school in the Stoa Poikile. He instituted a systematic curriculum of
philosophy, dividing it into three main disciplines, logic, ethics, and phys-
ics. Logic, said his followers, is the bones of philosophy, ethics the Xesh, and
physics the soul (D.L. 7. 37). Zeno studied under the great Megarian
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE
logician Diodorus Cronos, and was a fellow pupil of Philo, who laid the
ground for a development of logic which marked, in some areas, an
improvement on Aristotle.13 He himself , however, was more interested in
ethics.
It may seem surprising that a moralist like Zeno should give physics the
highest place in the curriculum. But for Zeno, and later Stoics, physics is
the study of nature and nature is identiWed with God. Diogenes Laertius
tells us, ‘Zeno says that the whole world and heaven are the substance of
Alexander standing in Diogenes’ light (Rome, Villa Albani)
13 On Diodorus and Philo, see Ch. 3 below.
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ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE